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Originally Posted by Nakor
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the pre-existing conditions part of the health care bill hasn't gone into effect yet, right? It only goes into effect for children at first, and then for everyone by 2014.
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Yes. But it *will* be available. I'm not worried about a potential couple of years' gap in health coverage (he's survived the last couple of decades without it); I was worried about setting up a precedent in which he got coverage for a few months, the economy did another nose-dive and half my department gets laid off, and then we'd be unable to get coverage for him at all.
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As for abortions, I can understand why the government would willingly take the position of not paying for/subsidizing them. While I am pro-choice, at the same time it is an optional operation. MSP here in British Columbia doesn't cover abortion, and that doesn't seem to be the source of any major problems. If memory serves, the healthcare reform bill doesn't exclude abortions after rape or incest or where the woman's life is in danger.
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The biggest problem with not including it is that most insurance companies are likely to drop it entirely rather than creating a controversial extra rider; some states are likely to remove access entirely--and hospitals are likely to stop providing it because it won't be covered and therefor won't be worth the resources to keep it available.
Right now, the US has seven states with less than five abortion providers in the state, and and 14 more with less than 10. (And those multiple providers tend to be clustered in the large cities, not spread out evenly.) Wyoming, the 10th largest state with almost 98,000 square miles (250,000+ sq km), has 2 abortion providers. In cases of rape or life-endangerment, emergency abortion services are pretty much nonexistent.
If this gap were being covered by increased birth control awareness & availability, it wouldn't be a problem--but it's not; we've got plenty of people who believe the only proper birth control is total abstinence, and that teens should be scared into not having sex by telling them lies about birth control failure rates. (It works about as well as you'd imagine--the states with the "abstinence only" sex-ed plans have the highest teen pregnancy rates.)